Hello everyone. As of two o'clock yesterday afternoon I am not the proud owner of an Amiga A2000 and can finally start indulging in my passion for old computers.
First, a little about myself. My name is Alfred Bonnabel and I live in Conway, Arkansas, USA with my wonderful wife and high energy one-year old son. I am an avid collector and tinkerer of retro video games and have been doing so for a few years now. Computers have been a passion of mine since my parents purchased their first IBM clone in 1987-88. Since then I have dismantled and upgraded every home computer they purchased as well as anyone else's that would let me. I cut my teeth on DOS 3.0 and to this day I still prefer a command line whenever I can get one.
About a year ago I started actively looking in my local area for a Commodore 64 or, if I was lucky, an Amiga. Pickings are fairly slim in central Arkansas and the few C64's I found were all way over what I was willing to pay (we're talking triple digit $$$ for a beaten up, might work/might now systems).
But it seems that holding out for the right deal worked in my favor as yesterday I walked into a Goodwill thrift store with my wife and discovered this Amiga 2000 standing sideways and mixed in with the other computers. I immediately froze and had to take a moment to pick my jaw up before I could even talk. Pulling the system out and laying it down on a nearby table to examine my find, I was pleased to see that everything appeared to be in good cosmetic condition. A few scrapes on the top and sides with a small dent on the bottom were the only signs of damage I could find.
I looked around in vain for a monitor, keyboard, mouse or anything else but had no luck. The best I could hope for was a quick test to see if there was at least some power going to the system so I grabbed a generic ac cable and plugged it in to a nearby wall outlet. Sure enough I got a power light then the hard disk light began to flicker. Oh happy days!
Looking a little closer I noticed the mono video output so at least I could hook it up to a TV to see something. The keyboard port in the front would have been a challenge but I keep plenty of spare computer parts and I remembered having an old adapter just for this. No serial mouse to speak of unfortunately so that will have to be my first purchase. Two 3.5 inch floppies and a 5.25 inch floppy rounded out the system.
Needless to say that once I got home the first thing on my agenda was the get this baby plugged in and to see what I've got. Well, I was extremely excited to see that the system powered on and booted into Workbench successfully. Unfortunately, using my TV as a monitor is not going to work well. The text was so blurry that I was barely able to make anything out. Plus, black and white just isnt fun. So add a monitor to my wish list with the mouse.
Being the intrepid and curious sort I knew that I would have to crack the case and figure out what all was installed since there was evidence on the back of at least two expansion cards. Imagine my surprise when I found out there were actually 3 cards installed, all of which were even more exciting the more I learned about them.
The first card, after some research, turns out to be an A2091 with a Quantum SCSI hard drive installed. I didn't remove the card but upon boot the system seemed to indicate that the capacity was around the 100MB mark. Will verify that later. Unfortunately no additional RAM is installed on this board.
The next card, which I forgot to write the specific model number down when I pulled it out, turned out to be a 2MB RAM card. Very nice.
The third and final card is the A2088T which the 5.25 floppy is connected to. An emulator card is going to be very fun to play with indeed.
All in all, yesterday was very exciting and it has carried over into today. I am so glad I've been able to find a community of Amiga users and enthusiasts who truly enjoy this system. I look forward to spending a great deal of time here and learning from the combined expertise available. One day soon I hope to begin making my own contributions to the community, but until then I hope to learn all I can about this amazing system.
I've uploaded some
pictures to my blog if you care to check it out.
